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Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide

This guide was created as an overview of the Linux Operating System, geared toward new users as an exploration tour and getting started guide, with exercises at the end of each chapter.
For more advanced trainees it can be a desktop reference, and a collection of the base knowledge needed to proceed with system and network administration. This book contains many real life examples derived from the author's experience as a Linux system and network administrator, trainer and consultant. They hope these examples will help you to get a better understanding of the Linux system and that you feel encouraged to try out things on your own.

I saw today suse is finally out of beta and on RC1. Just wanted to know what others thought about it and is it worth the headache of reinstalling suse all over again.Or if I should just stay with 10.0 for now. 10.0 has been flawless for me now for months.Also what changes have they made if any? And did you upgrade or fresh install? And how did it go.

First of all, like you I was using SuSE 10 and I was very impressed with it, everything worked well, and with some customization it was my perfect PC. I guess I missed it a lot ... I had to jump to 10.1 because KDE 3.5.2 managed to break my system beyond repair.

Now I'm running 10.1 RC1, and this is my review:

1. The installation is quite the same as in 10. At this point it's not possible to install extra software with YAST, you have to rely only on the packages in the CDs, the Installation source also has some bugs. I believe that all these details will be fixed for the final release.

2. You'll notice the Zen package that is used to install/remove/update packages, it's present in the panel and replaces YaST Online Update, you also have YaST, so you have two options now, very intriguing.

3. Mono and Beagle work out of the box, they have worked very hard and Beagle with Kerry as frontend will be the definitive application for search. I think that finally you have no more memory leaks in Beagle.

4. You have KDE 3.5.1, no news if you have it already in 10, SuSE KDE IMHO was the best but it feels that they are losing steam in supporting KDE, don't get me wrong it's by far the best KDE out there but ...

5. On the contrary SuSE GNOME 2.12 is superb. It's pretty clear for me that SuSE is developing heavily in GNOME, Beagle, Firefox!, YaST!, Amarok! all the packages are very well polished and working perfectly with GNOME. Right now I'm in GNOME and I can tell you that it's very stable (not like in 10).

6. At this point it's a complete mess trying to have the system stable, with the new Xorg 6.9, you have to build again the kernel modules for the graphic drivers (ATI and nvidia), I finally succeed in having 3d with the last ATI driver 8.24, I think nvidia drivers work fine. I still wondering why SuSE has Xorg 6.9 when most of the distros are working with 7.0. Remember that these are times of heavy developing in this area.

7. XGL also is not working out of the box, if and only if you succeed in having your graphic driver you can venture with XGL, most ATI cards are not supported, I couldn't make it work, I read somewhere that the lucky owners of nvidia cards have managed to make it work. Why XGL is not well implemented in 10.1 if it was NOVELL who started the development of XGL?, Ubuntu, Gentoo and even Debian have better support with this ...

8. You have to take into account that SuSE uses heavily your RAM, you need 1 GB to make it work with all the bells and whistles. I guess you can make it work with 512 MB, if you take out some packages. But I believe that is fair to have those numbers considering that this is the latest OS and the most complete you can get right now.

8. Finally, I'm enjoying a lot with SuSE 10.1, if they fix the problems I described above it will be unbeatable. So if you are happy with 10, then just wait for a while, it's planned a RC2 and then the final release. By that time you'll have also extra repositories with stable packages, and hopefully XGL working ...

At work we're going to upgrade from 9.2 to 10.1 on our servers. We've been getting grief from our webdev and serverdev departments to upgrade to PHP5 and mySQL5 and there's the fast approaching end-of-life for 9.2. So far we've been pleased with 10.1 even in Beta. Victorh's eval is spot on with our eval so far.

On the eye candy side, I have it installed on a spare machine at home and xgl with Nvidia was a a fairly painless install. Xgl is impressive as long as it has the resources. When you start stretching it it becomes extremely ustable.

I also agree with rkelsen and J.W. I have 10.0 on my laptop and main desktop and haven't seen any reason to upgrade either.

1. The installation is quite the same as in 10. At this point it's not possible to install extra software with YAST, you have to rely only on the packages in the CDs, the Installation source also has some bugs. I believe that all these details will be fixed for the final release.

Installation progress went really smoothly as usual, even with network installation.
THey have changed to partitions so that there are now 3 partitions to use.
One for swap, second one for / (this means everyhting else) and third one for /home .
With this kind of approach in the future it will be easyer to update the distro, because user doesn't need to format the home directories.

Quote:

Originally Posted by victorh

2. You'll notice the Zen package that is used to install/remove/update packages, it's present in the panel and replaces YaST Online Update, you also have YaST, so you have two options now, very intriguing.

As ZMD/ZEN uses mono, it uses a lot of memory ): ... And the Zen updater isn't as user friendly as YOU was, but I I can live with that.

Quote:

Originally Posted by victorh

3. Mono and Beagle work out of the box, they have worked very hard and Beagle with Kerry as frontend will be the definitive application for search. I think that finally you have no more memory leaks in Beagle.

I'm not truelly sure if the mono environment is a good thing in Linux. Yes .net is the great, but using it as default in linux sounds a bit creepy. I myself don't need Kerry/Beagle/google desktop/whatever. They scan your data and waste CPU time and memory. If I organize my files correctly there won't be any need of those. If i need to look for something i use "locate. BTW locate has been put into a its own package called find-utils-locate.rpm .

But yes the those two are working quite well and thats a good thing for regular joe.

Quote:

Originally Posted by victorh

4. You have KDE 3.5.1, no news if you have it already in 10, SuSE KDE IMHO was the best but it feels that they are losing steam in supporting KDE, don't get me wrong it's by far the best KDE out there but ...

Kde is working perfectly, although KDM is bit slow. AmaroK is my new friend. Im just loving it. There is really nothing earthshaking to say here, because it just work as it should be.

Quote:

Originally Posted by victorh

6. At this point it's a complete mess trying to have the system stable, with the new Xorg 6.9, you have to build again the kernel modules for the graphic drivers (ATI and nvidia), I finally succeed in having 3d with the last ATI driver 8.24, I think nvidia drivers work fine. I still wondering why SuSE has Xorg 6.9 when most of the distros are working with 7.0. Remember that these are times of heavy developing in this area.

Xorg 6.9== Xorg 7.0, but the directory structures/packaging are different, so development people decided to leave that for suse 10.2.

I downloaded the ati driver, packages it to RPM. Installed it and got 3D working without pain. I thought it was easy to do that.

Quote:

Originally Posted by victorh

7. XGL also is not working out of the box, if and only if you succeed in having your graphic driver you can venture with XGL, most ATI cards are not supported, I couldn't make it work, I read somewhere that the lucky owners of nvidia cards have managed to make it work. Why XGL is not well implemented in 10.1 if it was NOVELL who started the development of XGL?, Ubuntu, Gentoo and even Debian have better support with this ...

XGL is only for testing.. Its still in alpha stage. Its not intended to use, but if one wants to test, go ahead.

Quote:

Originally Posted by victorh

8. You have to take into account that SuSE uses heavily your RAM, you need 1 GB to make it work with all the bells and whistles. I guess you can make it work with 512 MB, if you take out some packages. But I believe that is fair to have those numbers considering that this is the latest OS and the most complete you can get right now.

This is because of the MONO+ ZEN/libzypp implementation. Mono has just in time compilers, it even takes ages to start zen-updater/RUG. I've got like 10 megs of free ram left (of 512)... So i disabled the ZMD/zen completely and started to use only smart. Well this is in KDE, but i think we have found a good competitor to Vista as the MS beast will need 2g of ram in normal use( read running some applications ,firefox,music players,photoshop,....). Id say that suse10.1+KDE needs a 512 by default. Lower than that and you are in trouble. 1g of ram is really recommended.

Quote:

Originally Posted by victorh

8. Finally, I'm enjoying a lot with SuSE 10.1, if they fix the problems I described above it will be unbeatable. So if you are happy with 10, then just wait for a while, it's planned a RC2 and then the final release. By that time you'll have also extra repositories with stable packages, and hopefully XGL working ...

The 10.1. is looking really promising. Its now fully opensource, so there won't be hopefully any more "which version to download"-questions. Netwokmanager give true user-friendliness to laptop users, and the suspend/powersave options should have been improved really much. Haven't tried gnome yet, but kde looks and feels great.

One thing to add to your list is the networkmanager. Damn, we have finally got a program to switch wlan networks easily. One just needs to click the network and write passphrase (And yes WPA is supported). THis is something I have been waiting since suse 9.0 and its now working.

Thanks for the reply - I did try an earlier beta but reverted back to 10.0 largely because of the package installing problems.

I was interested in 10.1 because I wanted MySql 5.0, and Php5 both of which I've since installed on 10.0 using the OSS sources even though my 10.0 was 10.0 Eval DVD. Installed fine.

I've still got another system running 9.3 which I want to upgrade. I don't want the hassle of 9.3 ==> 10.0 ===> 10.1 so I appreciate your review.

I'm glad there's always people out there willing to test the betas.

I think I'll wait this one out. I'm not afraid to try Beta's but the mechanism for installing software to me seems to be a paramount component of the OS. If you can't manage to install packages without a great deal of hassle then it IMO is a major bug.

Other errors I can usually live with especially in a beta but the package manager has been broken since the early betas -- I would have expected it in a RELEASE CANDIDATE to have been fixed.

Even if you CAN use RUG/Zen updater it's such a dogs dinner of a mess to use (and I'm no newbie) that getting the average joe to switch from Windows will become nigh on impossible even if on the surface SUSE 10.1 looks the best for "Normal Office type users" by far of any distro I've seen.

I really hope that this mess will be fixed by RC2 - it needs a proper and EASY GUI before it can seriously be classed as "Working".

I'm not afraiid to use a CLI but we are appealing to the 95% of typical users out there that would be totally lost without a GUI.

So staying with 10.0 and 9.3 for the moment but Thanks again for the info.